World of Warcraft, in a huge move for a 20-year old MMO, has just announced plans to slowly, but surely, phase out its combat add-ons in favour of building that functionality into the main game. The sky's not falling just yet, mind, and these plans aren't set in stone, but there's a possible future in which your WeakAuras and such will no longer work.
That doesn't mean Blizzard's taking the axe to all UI add-ons. As the article linked above explains, WoW will preserve add-ons meant for roleplay, as well as quest helpers and the like. But the studio seems set to remove things that would provide combat functionality in lieu of its own homegrown options. For example, an accessibility feature that lets you do your rotation with one button at a major DPS loss.
While I enjoy World of Warcraft quite a bit, I've played Final Fantasy 14, too. In case you're not familiar, the attitude towards UI mods in FF14 is far different—in that it's actively against terms of service. While plenty of players still use mods as Square Enix won't ban you unless you're obviously cheating—or someone reports you—they're nowhere near as big a part of the ecosystem.
As such, FF14's jobs are all designed to work swimmingly without combat add-ons. Rotations are intuitive (some might say too intuitive) and there are studio-made UI elements for each combat job to help you manage their core mechanics.
So trust me when I say I've been on both sides, see the merit in both systems, and I still think this is a really bad idea. Blizzard's asking for a fight it really doesn't want to start. Not from me, mind, but from both players who'll start to find the design flaws in their classes that their WeakAuras patched up—and a contingent of determined coding maestros who'll break whatever blocks they put in place over their knee.
Paved with good intentions
I'm about to somewhat contradict myself, but I will say that Blizzard offering its own UI improvements is an unalloyed good. The WIP cooldown manager feature is an excellent idea, one that can either remove the need for add-ons, or simply allow players with add-ons to remove a few superfluous WeakAuras that might be slowing their game down.
I also think it's great for the one-button rotation to be a thing. It'll be basically useless for anyone who wants to play the game competitively, but giving an accessibility option for players with physical disabilities is a good call. Especially with how important MMOs can become as a space for people with those conditions. It's also a good QoL feature if you're not disabled, and only want to hop in and collect transmog, or something—everybody wins.
But for those of us who do want to engage with its combat, a large part of WoW's UI ecosystem has involved players using add-ons to make up for flaws in its design, both in terms of UI and its classes. Take my class of choice, Outlaw Rogue, for example: Back in Dragonflight, the spec basically didn't function without a few key WeakAuras. Key procs and elements would pop up in your already-cluttered buff tray, and given how fast and frenetic the spec is, it was completely unusable.
But even in The War Within, Roll the Bones is sort of jank by design. Outlaw Rogues have a series of buffs they can randomly proc with Roll the Bones—which, in theory, means they'll be choosing to reroll the dice based on what buffs they need for the situation they're in. In actual practice, keeping track of a handful of discrete buffs completely rams up against the classes' fast-paced, if>then combat loop, and players already figured out the maths on which combination of auras is best years ago. A WeakAura solves this by simply suggesting when you should and shouldn't reroll.
By phasing out combat add-ons, Blizzard is giving itself an impossible job it just can't do."
And listen—that's a complete skill issue on my part. I'm ignoring a whole slice of my class with a UI AddOn. But, counterpoint, that slice sucks and is annoying. Blizzard has gotten away with Roll the Bones being an unintuitive mess with almost no usable UI feedback for years because of UI add-ons, and Outlaw is an extremely busy spec even without Roll the Bones. I'm sure I could manage it—but I'd probably enjoy it way less.
But I digress. World of Warcraft has 13 classes and a whopping 39 specialisations, as well as three hero talent options for each class. Take this hyper-specific complaint about Outlaw Rogue, and then extrapolate it out to all the little minute interactions that occur between classes, specs, and hero talents, and you start to see the problem taking shape.
Even if Blizzard had the best balancing team in the world, it still wouldn't be able to keep up with all the minutiae of each of these options and what they, specifically, need. By phasing out combat add-ons, Blizzard is giving itself an impossible job it just can't do. The game simply has too many moving parts.
There's also the element that hey, sometimes combat add-ons are just for flavour, as well. As a Fatebound Rogue, one of my most complicated custom WeakAuras is literally there to just tell me how many coins I've got stacked up, and to pop out a little pirate flag and play a jaunty tune when I hit the jackpot and get my agility buff. It's got no bearing on my actual rotation, I just like it.
Point being, Blizzard making its core experience better is great, as is reducing player reliance on add-ons. Being of a mind to phase them out entirely? You're placing the weight of the world on your shoulders. Players are already content to fix the cracks in their classes' particular drywall, but if you're gonna do it yourself, you can expect them to be miffed when some cracks remain. Which leads me to my second warning:
You don't wanna get in a slapfight with modders, dude. You'll lose.
It's not gonna stop them
If Final Fantasy 14 has proven anything, it's that reducing UI add-ons in the interest of fairness might slow modders down, but life, uh, finds a way.
Every single time a world first race comes up in FF14, it's revealed that the first team to win was usually using some sort of UI aid. Client-side UI tools are extremely hard to stop, and unless Blizzard is keen on adding some kind of anti-cheat (Square Enix is not, hence the issue), you're not gonna stop anyone determined enough to make the game easier.
I don't think this sort of behaviour is particularly great—you shouldn't cheat at online videogames—but it is going to happen. To make combat UI mods cheating, Blizzard then needs to solve the problem of how it punishes and detects them, starting an arms race it doesn't need to run.
I think Blizzard believes it can wrestle control back from a playerbase whose shenanigans have gone too far, while offering its own options to help make up for decades of live-and-let-live. In actuality, it's consigning its development team into an eternal game of whack-a-mole.
In the WoWCast video, Ion Hazzikostas explains that: "We want to keep chipping away at those things, and hopefully get to the point where really the only difference between what we are offering and what powerful add-ons can do is that small subset of computational problem-solving stuff, at which point we can move forward."
Blizzard can't assume it'll know what's good for every individual player."
In my bluntest of opinions, I think all of that is an excellent plan right up until the "moving forward" bit. Blizzard having its own set of officially supported UI features that make playing the base game possible for anybody is a net good—it's the right thing to do, it'll improve quality of life.
Clamping down on combat add-ons after that? That is utter lunacy. It's like promising a series of cool backflips before saying 'and then, once we've done our backflips, we're going to slip on a banana peel and fall off a big cliff.' Just don't fall off the big cliff, guys—folks will benefit tremendously from having those cool backflips in their life.
If you want a game that's less reliant on UI add-ons to have an acceptable experience, then bending your design towards that goal is noble and good. There is a potential future in which WeakAuras are no longer mandatory for most specs, and instead provide optional customisation tweaks to help personalise someone's game to their liking.
But Blizzard can't assume it'll know what's good for every individual player. It can't possibly create a baseline kit that covers every single angle—and it can save itself all the stress and headache of doing so by not holding itself to that standard. Improve the base UI, and stop sending a few egregious elements from the combat log if you must. But there's no reason to throw the baby out with the WeakAuras. Do both. Both is good.
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